Cisco’s latest Global Cloud Index provides projections for data centre and cloud traffic growth and discovers how the "multi-cloud era" will evolve between now and 2021. By understanding macro-level data centre and cloud traffic trends, all organisations can make more informed strategic networking and business decisions to address these challenges. In a world that is driven by data, some of the data findings are truly mind blowing!

We are in a world being driven by data. It’s all around us and plays a vital role in, and has a massive impact on, everything we do. Data is changing how we work, it’s changing healthcare, it’s changing how we drive - with the advent of driverless cars – it’s changing supply chains. In short, it’s changing lives.

And, if that sounds dramatic, the fact that more data was created in the last two years than in the previous 5,000 years of humanity shows the incredible data driven journey we are all on. This avalanche, generated by devices, cars, factories, and end users is enabling completely new capabilities, and creating massive opportunities - but it also presents challenges. The complexity of storing data, securing it, analysing it and processing it - increasingly in real time - is often significantly underestimated and is something that customers, no matter what their industry, are keen to understand.

Cisco’s latestGlobal Cloud Indexprovides projections for data centre and cloud traffic growth and discovers how the "multi-cloud era" will evolve between now and 2021. By understanding macro-level data centre and cloud traffic trends, all organisations can make more informed strategic networking and business decisions to address these challenges. In a world that is driven by data, some of the data findings are truly mind blowing!

It’s predicted that global data centre traffic will grow 3 fold by 2021, reaching 20.6 Zettabytes per year, or 1.7 Zettabytes per month. And, with more and more organisations running hybrid cloud environments, with both private and public clouds, as well as on premise resources, we expect Cloud traffic to grow 3.3X and represent 95% of total data centre traffic by 2021.

As we know, data is not just being generated by people, but by things. Our index also showed that, globally, data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT) will be 847 ZettaBytes per year by 2021, which is 41 times higher than the total data centre traffic (20.6 ZB).

Closer to home

The global data is fascinating but, bringing it closer to home, I was interested to see what is happening in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR). This is a hugely diverse region – culturally, economically and technologically.

People might expect to see the economic powerhouses of Europe being most advanced in terms of cloud adoption but the GCI revealed that the Middle East, largely unencumbered by legacy, is the fastest growing region for cloud adoption. Here, cloud traffic will increase by 3.9 times, vs a global average of 3 times.

Having recently spent time in this part of the world, these findings are in line with what I witnessed - huge innovation, an appetite for technological progress and leadership, as well as a willingness to invest.

Other highlights from EMEAR can be seen in the adjacent infographic.

Hyperscale

With more and more data to process, it’s no wonder that we need Hyperscale data centres, which consist of architectures designed to provide a single, massively scalable compute architecture.

Cisco’s GCI reveals that EMEAR will have over a fifth of the world’s share of hyperscale data centres, with most located in the UK, Germany, Ireland and Netherlands.

The location of data and where is it stored and processed is going to become even more important next year when the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect in May 2018. There will potentially be significant increases in fines and costs for organisations who contravene rules around data processing in EU member countries andanywhere where EU personal data is processed.

Opportunity

As businesses are becoming more digital, the increase in data is inevitable. The stakes are higher than ever before but so, too, is the opportunity as we all seek to analyse and act upon the information being generated.

Around 85% of the traffic on the internet touches Cisco equipment - huge amounts of data – but what is key is that the network is the only place where all this data travels through. We are building the next generation of networks to cope…to become less complex, more agile, more secure and give valuable insights.

And, back to our findings… if YOU need more data and insights, please click here for the rest of the details from Cisco’s 7th Global Cloud Index.